Is Richard Rohr a heretic?

[Editor’s note: this is important because of the growing popularity of Rohr’s teaching among Christians in the English speaking West who are looking for something less inconvenient and apparently more “deep” than re-statement of historic biblical faith for contemporary life.]

[…] Two things struck me immediately. First, from the beginning, the text included every buzzword from ‘progressive’ thinking that you would expect—inclusivity, feeling, relationship, and the central idea of the book, ‘flow’—along with cliched and stereotyped criticisms of propositions and formal religion. But secondly, and even more frustrating, the whole text appeared to have been thrown together, with little obvious line of argument, much repetition, and the appearance of the author simple adding thoughts as they occurred to him. (The fact that the book is written by ‘Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell suggests that this could in fact reflect the way it was produced.) Perhaps this was designed as a deliberate exercise in non-linear thinking; perhaps this was part of Rohr’s theological method of ‘circling around’ ideas; or perhaps it is just poorly written…

…But the content itself is equally problematic. There are plenty of helpful and positive insights, summarised in pithy observations—for example, that the metaphors for the Spirit in Scripture are constantly dynamic and fluid (p 59). But if you throw enough darts at a dartboard, you are bound to hit the bullseye from time to time, and in between these insights are a good number of things which are simplistic, unhelpful, and downright untrue. Perhaps the most breathtaking claim is that, since the Cappadocian fathers of the fourth century, no-one has been talking about the Trinity until William Paul Young wrote The Shack (p 26). Of course it is true that there has been something of a revival of thinking about the Trinity in the twentieth century, but it is quite difficult to comprehend how ignorant (and even self-important) one has to be to make such a statement. (Young wrote the forward to the book.)